In the early days of DLNA, DLNA compatibility was hit and miss despite the standard being clearly defined. This means that DLNA-compliant devices such as TVs, game consoles and media players can readily playback your media from your home media server over the network easily.ĭLNA media servers often add additional functionality too, such as scraping metadata like movie covers and transcoding your video files to ensure playback on a wider variety of devices. Basically, a media server lets you to share your movies, music and photos via the DLNA protocol. So now that you know about DLNA, you’re probably wondering why you need DLNA media server software. Why Do I Need DLNA Media Server Software? However, this is not accurate as DLNA enhanced the UPnP protocol with a focus on media. For example, you can stream music from your PC to your TV.ĭLNA is often used interchangeably with Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocols. This means that using DLNA-compliant devices means that you can easily share media. The DLNA standard establishes how enables networked media devices to share data. The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is the name of a non-profit organisation that controls the DLNA certification standard. You can find more about PlayOn over at their official site. Not only does PlayOn allow you to stream media using to DLNA-compatible devices, it’s also the only DLNA media server software to offer strong integration with streaming services like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and more. If you’re just wanting a quick solution, our pick for the best DLNA media server software of 2020 for most users is PlayOn. We’ve pulled together a handy list of our favorites.

However, with all the options out there, it can be a challenge to find the best DLNA server software that meets your needs. There’s a number of home media servers available which will do this either free or economically.

To do that, you’ll need to get a DLNA media server. The next logical step is to start streaming media throughout your network and share it across your devices such as your HTPC, Android TV Box, or Smartphone. Over the years, you’ve probably amassed a collection of DVDs, movie files, photos and music. Media is the cornerstone of every good home theatre setup so making sure you’ve got the best DLNA media server at your disposal is important.

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